Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized algorithm for area partition in surveillance missions that ensures information propagation among all the robots in the team. The robots have short communication ranges compared to the size of the area to be covered, so a distributed one-to-one coordination schema has been adopted. The goal of the team is to minimize the elapsed time between two consecutive observations of any point in the area. A grid-shape area partition strategy has been designed to guarantee that the information gathered by any robot is shared among all the members of the team. The whole proposed decentralized strategy has been simulated in an urban scenario to confirm that fulfils all the goals and requirements and has been also compared to other strategies.

Keywords

This work has been developed in the framework of the EC-SAFEMOBIL (FP7-ICT-2011-288082), the CLEAR (DPI2011-28937-C02-01) Spanish National Research project and the project of excellence of the Junta de Andalucía WSAN-UAV (P09-TEP-5120).